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A significant life does not have to find meaning because significance is given directly with reality.
— James Hillman
The unknown is the home of the real. To live in the known is bondage, to live in the unknown is liberation.
— Nisargadatta
Just when I found the meaning of life, they changed it.
— George Carlin
Looking for meaning following my post-5-MeO experience did nothing more than provide slippery, speedily-shattering steppingstones across the imaginary divides of a dimensionless abyss — spectral suspension bridges appearing and disappearing, blinking in and out of being, linking nowhere with nowhere.
Mindprints dissolving in space, leaving not even the echo of a trace.
Only for the briefest, most scantily draped of moments was I able to find any comfort in the explanatory dimensions of consciousness. My attempts to find or extract or assign meaning, whether mundane or metaphysical, at best only padded the cell for a bit.
At the extreme edge of meaning frothed my mind, playing paranoia-wigged peekaboo with the Context of context, zipping every which way with spermatozoan frenzy in the surreal vistas of gutted cyberspace.
And my attention? It toured my mind and the dying jelly of my body like a runaway camera, leaving me ominously freakish postcards, from which I derived not meaning, but only further confirmation of my metastasizing madness.
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To assume that anything possessed — or could claim — intrinsic meaning was absurd to me. Meaning appeared to be just a security-driven superimposition on Being, a consensual mind-game designed to distract us — and protect our separative self-sense — from that which had spawned us and paradoxically also was, as always, literally making an appearance as us.
So is Life meaningless? Coiled deep within-and-beyond the question is the
“answer,” existing not as a yes or no, but rather in the transverbal illumination of what is fundamentally motivating the question. Identifying who — or, more to the point, what — is formulating it is far, far more important than just attempting to reply to its content. Whatever is generating the question needs to be fully exposed and acknowledged, not just intellectually, but with our entirety. Then, and only then, can the actual relevancy of the question be viewed in its nakedness, so that it might spark a truly fitting response.
That is, when the question becomes primal inquiry, its investigation leads beyond the cognitive associations of the conventional mind into firsthand participation in deeper dimensions of Being. Something more real than answers — or what we “normally” think of as answers — is sought, intuited, taken in.
Life makes sense only when we stop trying to make it make sense.
Put another way, when we cease plastering meaning onto Life — thereby giving Life more breathing room, more space to be — then Life’s natural significance begins revealing itself to us.
The entire issue of meaning and meaninglessness, if explored with sufficient depth, provides an opportunity to become more aware not only of the functioning of our mind, but also of our attachment to knowledge and its various framings. Stephen Levine speaks of how “no ‘meaning’ can hold it all....There is an odd way the mind, particularly when threatened, attempts to find ‘meaning’ in life, to make some intellectual bargain with the unknown.”1
To talk of meaninglessness likely conjures up modern existential philosophy, as perhaps most famously conveyed through the novels of Camus and Sartre.
For Roquentin, the protagonist in Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea, not only is
“existence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, forever and everywhere,” but it is also repugnant, a “universal burgeoning” of things that have no reason to be, no great purpose or meaning.2 (It’s worth noting that in Nausea, Sartre may
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have incorporated and been “inspired” by a frighteningly bad mescaline trip he endured in 1935.3)
However, I could not settle here for very long, making existential real estate out of meaninglessness. When my mind was quiet and my heart open, the very same de-familiarized scenario — of horizonless, nameless, naked, ultravivid manifestation — could be before me in all its profuse enormity, and I would have room for it all to be just as it was. It still did not have any meaning for me, but now I did not mind. Its bare existence and seeming paradoxicalness— a neverending perishing that was never other than Eternal Being — drew me to it, beyond the reach of my mind, until my relationship with it became, at least to some degree, identification with it.
That is, my witnessing capacity would still be present, but not distinctly separate from what it was viewing — at least until thoughts like “Isn’t this incredible?”
or “How can I make this last?” would intrude and be allowed to recruit enough attention to convincingly recreate the sensation of an “I” apart from the whole situation.
The usual “I” is but a thought away.
So easy it is to shift from Be-ing to me-ing.
Life has no inherent meaning, both including and transcending whatever seeks to explain, conceptualize, frame, or contain it.
Meaning provides a sensation of security, a psychosemantic hedge against the Wild Mystery of Being, a comfortingly shared or personalized flag to hold up and wave in the midst of Infinity, a neatly-bricked bastion of explanatory facticity (and corresponding values) in which to hole up when emissaries of primordial Being — like Death — come knocking.
As necessary as meaning is at times — as when it provides needed bridges over stormy or confusing waters — it is fundamentally just a mental strategy.
It may take us to the very edge of the personal, but to proceed further, we must cease hanging onto it.
And we must also cease hanging onto meaninglessness. Where meaning seduces us with hope — nostalgia for the future — meaninglessness seduces us with
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despair — angst for the future. Beyond (and yet also simultaneously prior to) both hope and despair is the Now in which we are always already Home.
The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.
— Franz Kafka
In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do.
Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.
— Simone Weil
Meaninglessness is a grave problem to most, a burdened sea with no habitable coast, the suffocating yet reassuringly familiar shadow of a brooding existential ghost. Meaninglessness — which is not equivalent to purposelessness — is the glum and sometimes intellectually smug companion and angst-crowned legitimizer of despair, elevating to pseudo-priesthood those who claim to be able to restore meaningfulness.
Nevertheless, the issue of meaning and meaninglessness isn’t really that much of a core concern, being peripheral to the issue of purpose, particularly in the context of our destiny. Purpose as such involves the uncovering and fitting embodiment of a kind of psychospiritual blueprint, simultaneously simple and complex, already written yet invitingly blank, rich with improvisational possibility. Purposefulness may seem to semantically overlap with meaning-fulness, but it is much, much more than a cognitive construction. Purpose is far more organismic than meaning, rooted not just in mind, but in body, emotion, psyche, and spirit.
In such totality, there’s a felt sense of significance. Significance transcends meaning.
Meaning is rooted in dualistic apperceiving, but significance, in the crunch, is not nearly so dualistically rooted or framed or limited, signalling the felt impact of direct contact with What-Really-Matters.
We look for meaning, but we live significance. Meaning is in the mind, but significance is beyond the mind. As Nisargadatta says, “Knowledge by the mind is not true knowledge.”4
And is there really any such thing as an insignificant act?
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~ 154 ~ Slowly you stand
Your eyes widening pools of dawn Your look an answer with no question Arms swimming up through a starry sea
Intimate with both your uncertainty and your reach Your spine flirting with an unseen wind
Your head a sudden flowering atop an underwater stem Now the usual you makes its return
overattracting you to the familiar
And once again limitation is reduced to a problem And once again you forget you’ve forgotten And once again you remember, rearise, reenter
no longer shopping inside your skull
no longer making real estate out of meaning Your limbs tracing lines that need no explanation Your smile deeper than the dreaded abyss And we’re together in our aloneness Our infinity of appearances
Explaining nothing and revealing everything
NOTES
1. Levine, 1984, p. 30.
2. Quoted in Riedlinger, 1993, p. 36. During his mescaline experience, Sartre suffered delusions of such compelling intensity that he feared he was losing his mind. For months afterward, he endured flashbacks in which he imagined he was being chased by gigantic lobsters — perhaps representing the surfacing of some long repressed prepersonal issues. Who knows what form long-ago indignities and traumas will assume when they seize center stage? We may, for example, begin with acute biological panic — a physiological response — during a difficult birth, which then, under sufficiently stressful conditions, may manifest as anxiety — an emotional response — during childhood, and then, in adulthood, when similar stress arises, our original stress-response during our birth may manifest not just as anxiety, but also as paranoia or obsessive-compulsive thinking — both of which are but the originating fear-imprint going to mind. Perhaps if Sartre had traced his lobsters
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back, not just in time, but also from cortical to subcortical awareness, he may have recognized the originating gestalt of his mescaline-inspired fear (which Riedlinger claims involved Sartre’s actual birth).
3. Ibid., pp. 34-37.
4. Nisargadatta, 1992, p. 457.